'A positive surprise': O'Sullivan draws first blood in Super Formula rookie battle
Catching up with ex-Williams F1 junior Zak O'Sullivan after an eventful time in pre-season testing for the Kondo Racing driver at Suzuka... (Photos: JRP)
The feared arrival of snow, which turned Suzuka into a veritable winter wonderland on Wednesday, effectively condensed this week’s Super Formula pre-season test to a single day on Tuesday. And with the morning session being affected by residual snow, only the afternoon session can be treated as even remotely representative.
Even once the track had fully dried out, there were incidents aplenty, the most dramatic of which befell Kondo Racing newcomer Zak O’Sullivan. With around 20 minutes left on the clock, the British driver simply lost it exiting the hairpin on cold tyres and spun into the barriers, bringing his day to a premature end.
Despite that setback, which meant that he missed the chance to improve on fresh tyres at the very end of the day, O’Sullivan still concluded the day with the 10th-fastest time, 0.709s off the pace established by Tadasuke Makino. That meant he ended the day as the top rookie, the top foreigner, and faster than new teammate Kenta Yamashita to boot — even if only by a single thousandth of a second!
This was only O’Sullivan’s second day in a Super Formula car, as he had only taken part in the third and final day of the December Suzuka test in the #4 car that was driven on Day 1 by Ukyo Sasahara and on Day 2 by Juan Manuel Correa. With the third day in December reserved for rookies, it meant this was O’Sullivan’s first time matching himself against the full field of Super Formula regulars.
If we take the 20-year-old at his word and award him an extra three tenths for his final run on fresh tyres, he could have finished the test inside the top five. Not a bad day’s work then, even if the usual caveats apply about testing usually being a poor barometer of the season to come, particularly with half of the Japanese Grand Prix circuit having been resurfaced and receiving mixed reviews from the drivers.